He stayed where he was for a while. He felt tired, and trapped, and he wasn’t sure which way to move. Somehow, in New York, he had found it much easier to be positive, much easier to make clear-cut decisions. But on a farm like South Burlington, clear-cut decisions weren’t called for. You needed to sniff the wind, and make guesses, and alter your guesses to suit the changing weather. Farming was a life of constant compromise, and somehow the compromises were beginning to creep into his marriage.

Maybe Season was right. Maybe if she took a short vacation in Los Angeles it would help them both. But on the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would take them even further apart. After all, once Season began to mix with those Hollywood types, all those BPs and would-be movie stars, life at South Burlington would probably seem even duller than ever.

Maybe she would begin to think of Ed as nothing more than a stolid farmer. Something out of A. B. Frost.

‘Are you going to bed now?’ he asked Season.

‘I was considering it,’ she said. ‘But I won’t if you can think of something else to do around here.’

He shook his head.

‘That’s what I told Vee,’ she remarked. ‘Farming in Kansas is nothing but fertilising, furrowing, fooling-around and fornication.’

He got up. ‘I won’t be too long,’ he said. ‘I have to call Charlie Warburg.’

‘Charlie Warburg? From the finance company?’

‘That’s right.’

She frowned as she watched him walk across the room to the door. ‘He’s in charge of losses, isn’t he?’

‘Kind of.’

‘So what you were saying about that wheat blight – you were serious about that? Is it really so bad?’

‘I don’t know yet. It could be.’

‘Ed—’ she began.

He paused by the bedroom door. She looked as if she was about to say something, but it was plain that she couldn’t find the words. She sat there, with her arms crossed over her bare breasts, and looked at him with an expression that could have meant I’m sorry, or I wish we’d never met, or anything at all. Ed waited a moment longer, and when she didn’t say anything, he closed the door and went downstairs.

Three

It was a quarter after six the next morning when the Hughes helicopter rose from the small pasture at the back of the South Burlington farmhouse and tilted its way north-westwards into the bright, snappy sky. The rotor blades flashed in the sunlight as it headed out past the hickory stand, and the flack-flack-flack of its engine was echoed by the outbuildings and the fences.